With more matches being called off for rain this weekend, we thought we’d do a 2 minute read on environmentally friendly kits.

If you look at the carbon costs of a custom football shirt made in the near or far East, about 35% of the total lifecycle cost are in manufacturing and using the kit.  15% of the costs are in making the fabric, and about 50% of the total costs are in air freighting the kit to the UK.  You can drastically reduce the freighting carbon costs by 95% by freighting by ship, but this would mean that kit would take months to be delivered.

So 50% of the costs are in shipping the kits; and 15% carbon costs are in manufacturing the fabric.  Using recycled materials to produce the fabric can cut carbon by about two-thirds.

We manufacture our kit in England, so we don’t have that carbon shipping cost.  If we moved our production offshore we’d practically DOUBLE our carbon footprint immediately – in order to make a much smaller saving by using recycled materials.

We do want to move to recycled fabrics…but for the time being we can be much more environmentally friendly simply by manufacturing in England.